A Fishmas Story

Twas the night before Christmas when all through the boat
Not a creature was stirring, on land or afloat.
The tackle was hung by the landing net with care
In hopes that a Redfish soon would be there.

The Marina staff waited all snug in the store
With visions of rental boats coming ashore.
And Becky at her parents' and I in my (fishing) cap
Had just settled our brains for a long weekend nap.


When out of the fishfinder there arose such a clatter
I jumped out of the deck chair to see what was the matter.
Away to my fishing rod I flew in a flash
Threw my line overboard where it landed with a splash.

The moon had been full and the tide was so low
I could see very clearly the fishes below.
What to my wondering eyes should appear
But Redfish and Sheepshead right by the pier.

With great big fat shrimp so lively and quick
I picked up my fishing rod and gave it a flick.
More rapid than 'cudas the Redfish they came
And I whistled and shouted and called them by name!

Now Dinner! and Luncheon!  Now meals I am fixin'!
With spices and rubs and oil in the mixin'!
From the top of the stove to the top of the fryer
Pull out the Barbie and light up the fire!

As fast as the wind that before wild hurricanes fly
I boated a Redfish, all golden of eye.
So into the cooler the fishy it flew
So full of ice water and Sheepshead too.

And then in a twinkling I heard through the hull
The raucous demanding of a large laughing gull.
As I swiveled my head and was turning around
A big school of mullet jumped up with a bound.

I was dressed for the weather, from head to my feet
On my clothes I had wiped small bits of shrimp meat.
A bundle of leaders I had in my hand
I had hooks galore in every brand.


My eyes how they twinkled, my dimples so merry
When I thought of the fish all swimming unwary.
My droll little mouth was drawn up in a bow
Thinking of fishies swimming below.


A line and a leader I held in my teeth
My filleting knife nestled so sharp in it's sheath.
I pulled in a fish with a little round belly
And I laughed and I laughed till the boat shook like jelly!


It was chubby and plump, a right handsome young fish
But I threw him back in, too short for my wish.
A wink of my eye and a twist of my head
Soon gave him to know he had nothing to dread.


I spoke not a word but went straight back to work
And pulled up another fish soon with a jerk.
Laying a measuring stick up to his nose
Into the cooler where quickly he froze!


When finally I'd taken all the fish I could eat
Sheepshead and Redfish so tender and sweet.
I pulled up the anchor and chugged out of sight.
Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

A Thanksgiving Fish Sticks Story

It's getting colder, really, really colder. The tides are extreme and fishing in the river is shaping up to be interesting this year.  Once again we set out in frigid temperatures up the river on a low, low tide.  Everything was low.  The river, the temperature, and the variety of fish we caught.  

We caught Sheepshead.  

 

I know I've mentioned Sheepshead rather a lot lately.  I know I said Sheepshead are notoriously difficult to catch, we never catch many, they're hard to find, blah, blah, blah.  Sheepshead have become the WalMart shoppers of the river.  You see them everywhere and wonder why they look like that.  These buck-toothed, chicklet teeth, jailhouse-striped bone heads are more numerous than rednecks at a NASCAR event.  They have completely lost their cachet; like when Dione Warwick changed her name to Diane Warwick.  She didn't sound any different but no one listened to her any more.  Sheepshead don't taste any different, they're still the best eating fish around, but, we're just a little tired of catching them.  We're also just a little tired of freezing while fishing.  It was so cold (how cold was it?) that when we pulled the fish out of the water they froze into fish sticks.  We were so cold we fished from inside the cabin for much of the day.  

The river was so low the anchor never touched the water.  


We managed to catch the same small Sheepshead all day long, although, by the end of the day it was a bigger Sheepshead due to all the shrimp it had eaten.  

After being cold all day eating shrimp sounded like a good idea so we pulled the anchor out of the muck and went home and ate bait for Thanksgiving dinner.  It was good.

Can You Steam Oysters in a Pressure Cooker And Other Chef Questions

Can you steam oysters in a pressure cooker?  No.  Well, no for me anyway.  After searching through the manuals for both of 
my pressure cookers and through many thoughtful (ha!) articles online, I conclude the answer for us is;  no pressure cook the oyster.  We steamed them over the grill instead which was wonderful. Except, when we go to Barnacle Bill's the barrista (oysterista?) shucks them for us.  Fast.  Over the grill is a different story.  A sloooowww story.  We got more hungry the more we ate because the faster we ate the slower it got.  So, we either eat at Barnacle Bill's or, well, there is no or.  I enjoyed the B-B-Q experience and I'm done.  Let someone else shuck them.







Next; how to fillet and cook Sheepshead.  Not as simple as you'd think.

We Should Have Brought Scout

Let's all welcome winter fishing with a show of blue-fingered hands.  Brrr. The weather report showed a Small Craft Warning, 20kt winds, and a low tide 1' below low mean.  This means difficulty anchoring in a river of mostly mud.  We couldn't wait!  When we got to the dock the tide was about the lowest I've seen in a long time.  Usually, you can see about 3' of mud from the dock to water.  Today there was about 50'.  Motoring away from the dock was a challenge multiplied by the fact that the middle of the channel only had 3' of water.  We're talking low.  We gingerly motored down the Wakulla and up the St. Marks which, thankfully is a much narrower river and dredged.  The narrowness causes a deeper channel and we did find about 10' in the shallowest parts.  Itty Bitty channel + cold front + North wind = lots of fish, or so the equation should go.  In fact, it DID equal lots of fish!  But first, a word about Sheepshead.

This is a Sheepshead (the one in the foreground, the one in the background is a Straw Hat Head)

Sheepshead are notoriously difficult to catch.  They have two or three rows of flat, square, chicklet-like teeth and they are very, very picky, delicate eaters.  

This is Scout, an ancient Australian Shepherd who has never been fishing but you have to have a sheepdog in a Sheepshead story.



We anchored at one of our favorite spots in the river and commenced fishing.  The wind, at this point, was just blowing.  Later it would begin howling.  Bec easily caught a (wait for it) Sheepshead.  "Wow, we never catch those!"  Well, we did catch those.  We only caught those.  

We caught one at a time,

we caught two at a time,






we caught nothing but Sheepshead all the time.  Normally, this is not something I would complain about but, the more we caught the sharper the vision of me having to clean all these Sheepshead became.  Sheepshead and Redfish are very hard to clean.  Big scales, tough skin.  Wonderful to eat, tough to clean.  Anyway, we fished and we caught.  And then, 

we ate.  What?  Did you think we weren't going to eat!




As you can see from the lovely mud background, the river was still low.  But, the wind was picking up.  We started out measuring every fish and keeping every 12-incher.  We got more discriminating the more we caught.  Finally,

after being blown into the trees and after 

taking on leaves and tree limbs, 




and just generally being blown all over the place, we packed up to go home.  I was dreading cleaning all those fish, Bec was dreading cleaning the boat in the cold so, we did both together.  

Catch of the day:  six nice Sheepshead.

One Or The Other

My fishing logs from the past do not lie.  We started out to fish the flats but were seduced by the sight of a very large sheepshead swimming under the dock as we put in.  We fished the river.  While I geared up the rods Bec proceeded to catch fifty-eleven redfish, all pups.  While I tried to fish she continued to catch short reds which, while I took them off the hook, my bait was stripped.  So while I re-baited, Bec caught more reds.  This continued for a very long time.  Finally, I caught a fish.  A big fish.  A keeper redfish which turned out to be the first of only two keeper fish of the day.  While we were fishing the weather went from calm to really blowing with waves in the river.  We rejoiced that we were not on the flats being blown to hell and back.  We fished and fished and fished.  I caught a small sheepshead and then a keeper sheepshead.
Nice fish.  We started with 150 shrimp and we should have gotten 200.  More on that later.  The tide was just ripping along and the water was so clear we could see the bottom at 6'.  I was casting to a pole in the water near the shore and I turned to put a shrimp on my hook, when I turned back a log had floated up to the pole.  I asked Bec if that log had been there all the time or if it just appeared.  We stared at it and it started to move.  Upstream.  It was a pale Manatee.  It stuck it's snout out of the water, looked at us, and moved on by.  Later, three large tarpon glided by, on their way to wherever tarpon go when no one's cleaning fish at the dock.  I can say from experience, tarpon are big on being fed fish carcass at the dock.  The fishing slowed so we did what we always do when the fishing is slow.  We ate.

We ate chips,

We ate boiled peanuts,

We stood on the bow and wished for fish.






Alas, fishing as we know it was over for the day.  We continued to catch little fish.  Pinfish.  We used up 150 shrimp.  And we made our fatal decision.  We would go back to the dock and get another 100 shrimp.  We got greedy.  The fish gods had given us two nice fish and we wanted more.  We motored back to the dock, got 100 more shrimp, motored back to the spot we had been anchored in, and caught nothing.  We lost many more shrimp to pinfish before Bec took a short nap and I contemplated absolutely nothing.  We decided to throw in the towel.  Back to the dock where I cleaned the redfish and the sheepshead, possibly two of the most difficult fish to clean owing to the size and thickness of their scales.  I feel like I have to drill through them, not an easy task.  We take a side trip to Lighthouse Seafood where Tammy hooks us up with a half a croaker sack of oysters and we get home later than we wanted with fish and oysters and dogs happy to see us.  The next adventure:  can you steam oysters in a pressure cooker?  Hope to safely find out.

Do They Make Bad Fishing Days?

This is the Good:

Friday
N 8kt
Hi: 75 °F

The Bad:

 

 and,

 The Rest Of The Story:

The answer is 47.  No, actually the answer is: there are no bad fishing days.  There are bad catching days, bad weather days, bad engine problem days, bad equipment days, bad sandwich days, blah, blah, blah.  Fishing does not allow crybabies.  There is no crying in fishing.  Unless you get a hook completely through your finger right in the middle of one of the best mackerel runs in a long time and your fishing partner, a nurse no less, can't stand the sight of your blood and a large hook sticking through your thumb so she insists that you stop fishing and drive all the way to the emergency room to have it cut out which, frankly, hurt more than the damn hook in my finger and by the time that adventure was over so was the fishing for the day at which time I did feel like crying because we were catching mackerel dammit.  We're over that now.  Fishing tomorrow looks good.  Beautiful weather but flat tide.  Cold front, which means the fishing in the river will have picked up.  If it picks up more than the two redfish I caught last week I will be delirious.  My fishing logs, starting in 2006, show an even split between mackerel on The Rise and redfish in the river.  Depends upon the water temperature and the tide.  And the fishing gods.  On every occasion this time of year we tried the flats and the river and filled the cooler on one or the other.  We currently have sheepshead fever and will probably try the river at some point.  Anticipating going fishing is almost as much fun as fishing without having to clean the boat.  Today we anticipate, tomorrow, we fish.

One Fish Two Fish, Redfish, Blue Runner